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Double Take Quilt-Along - Quilting

Thursday, August 04, 2011

So your top is pieced, now you are wondering how the heck to quilt it. Another great thing about technology today is that you can try out different quilting options without ever having to sew a stitch, or more importantly, pick out stitches when you don't like it!

I decided to keep the quilting simple for this top design. And geometric. I love quilt patterns that are geometric. It must be the engineer in me.

First I looked at doing circles to contrast the hard edges of the top:

Click to see more detail!

These circles seemed too plain to me, so I tried out some larger ones that would over-lap each other:

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I like how that looks. Definitely a candidate. Next let's see what some straight lines would do for the top design:

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I definitely like the straight lines, but think maybe it needs a bit more quilting. Let's try one more:

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This is perfect. It complements the top design and also gives it a bit of a modern plaid feel. This is a pretty simple design that you can do on your domestic machine, but it is also an easy design to do on a longarm if you have access to one.

I chose to use white thread to quilt the top. For the batting, I decided to use a 100% cotton batting in white - white because much of the top (as well as my back) are white. I've found that some white fabrics, even though they are a good quality, cannot hide the natural color of non-bleached batting. Because I wanted the quilt to be a little thicker than usual, I used a thicker loft batting.

Here is the finished quilt:

I won't get into the details of how to bind the quilt. There is a great tutorial on perfect binding from award winning quilter Sharon Schamber. Check it out here! I follow her binding method on every quilt I make, including the part where she said to use washable glue! Trust me...it's worth it! Your binding will shine with the rest of the quilt.

Well, I hope you enjoyed quilting along with me. This has been a great experience. Again, thanks to Faith at Fresh Lemons for letting me use my design that came out of her Quilt Mock-up tutorial.

If you do overlapping circles like in the image, you would need 36 circles centered on the burgundy squares only in the odd number rows. You may also want to do arches at the edges of the quilt, where the centers would be off-quilt, to mimic what is happening on the rest of the quilt (this is not shown in the image).